Good Idea........

I have been telecommuting for 4 years now and would not trade it for the 1.5 hour drive one way at all. This is the best of both worlds, I get to stay home and save gas money and the company gets my time and attention pretty much 24/7. And for 40 hours pay. We all win. I have my laptop, VPN to work, a good speakerphone and a company paid ATT&T calling card. My team is based in Mass., Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin and Malaysia. A virtual team if there ever was one.

I have been telecommuting for 4 years now and would not trade it for the 1.5 hour drive one way at all. This is the best of both worlds, I get to stay home and save gas money and the company gets my time and attention pretty much 24/7. And for 40 hours pay. We all win. I have my laptop, VPN to work, a good speakerphone and a company paid ATT&T calling card. My team is based in Mass., Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin and Malaysia. A virtual team if there ever was one.

Sorry, but can't get the idea from my head that all these networking geeks are just sitting in their boxers, hairy-chested and backed, slurping Mountain Dew and playing Halo in-between resetting remote servers. Doesn't seem like it's a very good value at $70K a year. Can't monkeys be trained to do this?

:-)

All I can say is "about time"! Why does it take gas prices tripling in a few years to get this trend moving? We've had broadband for a decade now and we're still acting like we're all on dial-up. If people in India can support machines in the USA then so can US IT workers support them remotely.

If the employer is going to salary us, require us to work after hours and usually long hours beyond the 40 work week then they can pay the usual amount for us to telecommute. 10% pay cut, that's an insult ... I don't care how awsome working from home can be. Most IT work, the same amount of work, can be done from home. Why does it matter, in terms of compensation, where the work in done?

the _real_ answer is... it doesn't really matter. It's an excuse for executives to save a few bucks with the slight-of-hand gimmick that is telecommuting.

Management would be more likely to accept telecommuting if workers telecommuted from a Remote Office Center rather than their own home. A Remote Office Center provides structure, infrastructure and a professional work environment from a location that is near where employees live. In and ROC, workers from multiple companies lease office space and infrastructure in a shared facility. This is the best of both worlds. Management can be assured that workers have a professional reliable work environment (that has been outsourced), and workers can skip long and costly commutes.

Now, I have been telecommuting since 80's - had two 56Kb X.25 lines coming home (and a portable phone - weight only 12 pounds!) plus the company car in case of.. Since then, never without a home line - still trying to get rid of the cell phone..

Taking %10 off(?), at that time it meant to have %10 (or %20) more! More work, no quiet time, etc.

OK, times change. And the jobs change! In todays specialized world, if you have only one task to do, I would take the 10% cut. Sitting on some highway twice a day, having a crappy cubicle, trying to concentrate to my task in an office environment, going to phone training or some other meaningless meeting - I would actually take 20% cut and be happy to work at home. Guaranteed better results!

Now - it will not work work with managers who are control freaks, it will not work (today, more later) in agile projects, it will not work some personalities, it will not work if you have a family which doesn't understand and go with it, and many other things to look.

The later - the agile projects and also the customer contacts have changed over the time. The agile meant really to get together and to solve the problems - never in workplace but in some external place where we could concentrate to the problems and not be interrupted. Same with the customers, not in their or our premises but somewhere where we could really make things to work.

This has changed - too many layers between the solution and the problem and that can kill the telecommute! Telecommute doesn't mean isolated - it means that you work where the best results are archived, home, resort, Starbucks, even in office. It is so much easier technically today but, as I have seen, often hard to sell to inexperienced management which is not so much concerned of the results but their own posture thinking that it will get them up in the ladder!

Taking into account the cost savings for real estate, power, heating/cooling, lighting, network, telecoms etc, employers should be paying 10% higher salaries for telecommuter employees.

I'm pretty sure that the savings would total way more than $7,500.

Productivity would also increase as at least 15% of the day is taken up talking to co-workers about last night's game, what you did at the weekend etc.